Soon, babbling on a tv near you…

So, a few weeks ago, Jason forwarded this email to me. The producers of a show wanted talking heads, especially science fiction writers, to come to a studio and babble about Halo 3. Jason couldn’t do it ’cause he was at a conference in Portland, and Ken was at the same conference. Could I do it?

Now, while I used to make video games, I haven’t touched Halo since the first game, and then it was only a few hours’ worth of farting around to see how well it played on our XBox dev kits. But the producer sounded desperate for talking heads, and he dangled the possibility of me getting a 360 for a few hours of my time, and since I was still brain-dead from coming home from Chengdu and Worldcon, I said yes. Great, said the producer, just fill out this seven page, single-spaced questionnaire, but only the questions you feel comfortable answering. Thanks to Wikipedia, I got filled in on the Halo bits I missed, filled out everything that has to do with story-telling and myth-making and video games in general, and waited. They called back the next day, told me to show up at such-and-such studio the following Monday.

Monday rolled around, I went to the rent-a-studio off of La Brea, got made up, helped myself to the craft services table, talked to the producer and found out that he *had* been desperate for talking heads (he’d just been dropped onto this project the day before he called Jason), then sat in a chair while the director and host peppered me with questions that I’m totally unprepared to answer about a game series that I hadn’t played in ages. It was, as they kids say, surreal. I did my best to disabuse their notions that Star Wars is SF, and talked about Ringworld and Iain M. Banks (and correcting their questionnaire that called him Iain Brooks) and to answer questions in complete answers. I think they were just as relieved as I was when the directory of photography said they were out of tape.

I thought that was it, until today, when the producer emails me and says that my babbling is going to be on “Halo 3: Sci vs. Fi,” on the Sci Fi Channel on September 25 at 4 p.m. EST, with an encore at 11 p.m. EST. I’ll be the guy in the orange shirt that says “No Smoking Near the Hyperdrive Generator.” Jebus.

Except we discovered last night that the new DVR that came with our new cable will, in fact, R, but it’s somewhat broken when it comes to playback. Talk about archival – “yes, we have it, but you can’t see it.”